Saturday, June 09, 2007

Condi Rice explained in an interview that the thing about Iraq being like Korea is a metaphor, not an analogy. So that’s okay, then.

Bush had a brief press conference with Italian PM Prodi (who thinks that all American high schools offer Italian classes) (which may not be true, but many of us have picked up some practical Italian from The Sopranos).

Mostly, Bush talked about his meeting with the pope (sadly, the two did not have a joint press conference), who he again called “His Holy Father.” When they met, he called him “sir,” which is evidently such a breach of protocol that people gasped. “First, I’ll give you an impression. I was talking to a very smart, loving man. ... And I was in awe, and it was a moving experience for me.”

Pope Benny evidently expressed some concern about Christian Iraqis – or as Bush put it, “he’s worrisome about the Christians inside Iraq being mistreated by the Muslim majority” – but none about the non-Christian Iraqis dying every day – “We didn’t talk about ‘just war.’” What exactly is the point of a pope, if when meeting a man in charge of an unjust war, he doesn’t even bring the subject up?

Bush said that the decision not to renominate the alliterative Peter Pace “speaks to the U.S. Congress and the climate in the U.S. Congress.” Cloudy with a slight chance of oversight?